Modern portable consumer and industrial electronics provide increasing levels of functionality to support modern life including location-based information services. This is especially true for client devices such as navigation systems, cellular phones, portable digital assistants, and multifunction devices.
As users adopt mobile location-based service devices, new and old usage begin to take advantage of this new device space. There are many solutions to take advantage of this new device opportunity. One existing approach is to use location information to provide navigation services, such as a global positioning service (GPS) navigation system for a mobile device.
Navigation system and service providers are continually making improvement in the user's experience in order to be competitive. In navigation services, demand for better usability by providing additional information is increasingly important. To provide additional information, some navigation systems and services allow the creation and distribution of user generated content (UGC). UGC can include information entered by users to supplement what is provided by the service provider.
UGC can include a wide variety of useful information. For example, UGC can include information about a point of interest. Information could include a point of interest for a restaurant and include information such address, phone number, menu items, ratings, or any combination thereof. The creation and editing of UGC is generally unregulated and uncontrolled, so UGC must be verified and validated in terms of accuracy before being fully accepted and distributed in the navigation system. Because of the large amount of UGC created by users, an automated verification method is an important, yet challenging task.
The volume of UGC is constantly increasing as more systems allow users to create and edit new content. As the amount of UGC grows, the need to verify and validate the UGC grows as well. New methods for increasing the performance and capacity of automatic UGC verification are needed.
In response to consumer demand, navigation systems are providing ever-increasing amounts of information requiring these systems to improve usability, performance, and accuracy. This information includes map data, business data, local weather, and local driving conditions. The demand for more information and the need to provide user-friendly experience, low latency, and accuracy continue to challenge the providers of navigation systems.
Thus, a need still remains for a navigation system to provide user generated content verification with improvement in usability, performance, and accuracy. In view of the ever-increasing commercial competitive pressures, along with growing consumer expectations and the diminishing opportunities for meaningful product differentiation in the marketplace, it is increasingly critical that answers be found to these problems. Additionally, the need to reduce costs, improve efficiencies and performance, and meet competitive pressures adds an even greater urgency to the critical necessity for finding answers to these problems.
Solutions to these problems have been long sought but prior developments have not taught or suggested any solutions and, thus, solutions to these problems have long eluded those skilled in the art.